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The marriage of major league baseball and technology seems to prove once and for all that opposites really do attract.

In this case, the technology is instant replay, which in the techno-world seems about as fresh as Thomas Edison. But new or not, Major League Baseball was the last of the four major American professional sports to embrace it, for reasons that are becoming increasingly clear.

Baseball entered the replay jungle with baby steps in 2008, allowing only umpires to initiate a review on boundary home run calls. After six seasons of this wild and crazy behavior, it finally took the fateful plunge this season, instituting a system in which each manager is allotted one challenge per game, and a second if the first challenge results in an overturned call.

The umpire crew chief is allowed to initiate his own replay review if neither team challenges remain from the seventh inning on, and he also can initiate reviews on home run calls.

For baseball, which prides itself in being steeped in tradition, this is radical stuff. Not quite two months into the season, however, things haven’t always gone as planned.

My favorite moment occurred on April 13 in a game aired by ESPN when first base umpire Bob Davidson called New York Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli out at first on what appeared to be a routine double play.

New York manager Joe Girardi challenged the call, and even though TV viewers saw multiple replay angles that appeared inconclusive, the umpire in baseball’s Replay Operations Center in New York overturned the call and called Cervelli safe.

Angry Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell shot out of the dugout and launched into a tirade, and Davidson summarily threw him out. So this is how far our civilization has advanced: Davidson, who originally had called Cervelli out, threw out Farrell for arguing that Cervelli was out.

But what is a manager to do when the replay seems conclusive and some guy in another location says it isn’t?

Cincinnati Reds first-year manager Bryan Price had one of those John Farrell moments on April 27. He asked for a replay after Atlanta’s B.J. Upton was called safe at first on a pickoff attempt.

First baseman Joey Votto caught the ball and swiped at Upton’s hand before it touched the base. The replay was deemed inconclusive, even though it seemed to show Upton was out. Price came out to ask how that could be inconclusive and was ejected, his first as a manager. Price never got an answer, and neither did the team when it asked for one the next day.

Even if it weren’t for those kinds of calls, there have been other issues:

At the end of April, the sport’s Playing Rules Committee had to clarify when a catch is a catch — think about that for a minute — because of several controversial replay decisions on plays where drops occurred while a player was transferring the ball from his glove to his hand to make a throw.

Replays have taken an average of two minutes to resolve doubts — not bad until you realize that managers go onto the field to protest, and stall, while they await word from their video review guy on whether they should challenge the call. In some cases, that might take longer than the actual review, and some of those have been timed at more than four minutes.

According to BaseballSavant.com, the number of decisions upheld slightly outnumbers those overturned (176-160), which still says that umpires are wrong more than we’ve been led to believe and doesn’t take into account calls that managers and players think the system still got wrong even after the review.

Nobody is perfect, but there is a growing feeling that a game that was close to perfection is being made worse by technology that legendary manager Earl Weaver would have found pretty lame.